Review by New York Times Review
AN ORAL HISTORY of David Bowie is almost an act of redundancy. His whole career was an exercise in fragmentation and disconnection, a hodgepodge of widely varied aesthetic propositions and provisional identities that any hundred people could take a hundred different ways. "He gave you what you wanted," the journalist Angus MacKinnon recalled to the pop-culture writer and editor Dylan Jones for "David Bowie: A Life," the first major book about Bowie to be published since his death in January 2016. "If you were in shades and tight black leather trousers he would give you the rock and roll interview, and if you were me, wearing drainpipe cords and a tweed jacket and the air of the rock pseudointellectual about you, he would give you that.... It must have been exhausting to be David Bowie." "David Bowie: A Life" brings together excerpts from interviews with some 200 people who knew Bowie - or believed or suspected or imagined things about him, having been granted temporary access to parts of the many personas Bowie parceled out over more than 50 years as a performer. The author, a longtime Bowie watcher who interviewed his subject on multiple occasions and wrote an earlier book about him, "When Ziggy Played Guitar," has the cred necessary to land most of the key players in Bowie's life, from Peter Frampton, one of Bowie's childhood friends, to Iman, Bowie's widow. The book delivers expert and entertaining testimony from Tony Visconti, the producer who worked extensively with Bowie from his early years to his last recordings; Brian Eno, the composer and producer who collaborated with Bowie on the trilogy of albums ("Low," '"Heroes'" and "Lodger") that are among his most highly regarded; Elton John, who goes through no effort to disguise his displeasure with his onetime colleague in the making of space-oriented, sexually transgressive pop; the guitarists Mick Ronson and Carlos Alomar; Coco Schwab, Bowie's longtime personal assistant and protector; and others such as the actress/publicist Cherry Vanilla and the singer Ava Cherry, who, along with countless other women (and perhaps some, if not as many, men), had affairs (or just sex) with Bowie. Organized chronologically with interstitial text by Jones to fill in biographical data and provide some context here and there, the book covers Bowie's life from his middle-class upbringing in Brixton, in South London, and then Kent, on the city's outskirts, to his final years of lowkey, nearly anonymous life with his wife and their young daughter in Lower Manhattan. Raised by a cinemausher mother and a public-relations-executive father, David Jones grows up with a taste for Hollywood glamour and a sense of the power of hoopla. Longtime Bowie followers will have read elsewhere about this, as well as the family history of mental illness that affected at least two of his maternal aunts (Bowie sometimes claimed all three of his mother's sisters committed suicide, but the book is more circumspect) and his older half brother, Terry, who was understood to be schizophrenic and was institutionalized for a time. Bowie would talk of his brother sparingly, but with affectionate gratitude, acknowledging Terry for introducing him to Beat literature and jazz, the emblems of American cool for postwar youth everywhere. As Jones quotes Bowie: "I guess most of us have battled with reality and something else all of our lives. I think Terry probably gave me the greatest, serviceable education that I ever could have had. He just introduced me to the outside things." The dynamics between the real and the imagined, facts and artifice, the "true" self and performance - the great themes of David Bowie's work - provide the otherwise scattershot materials of "David Bowie: A Life" with a semblance of continuity. In a charming recollection of Bowie's childhood, his old friend George Underwood describes Bowie's father taking the two boys to a public appearance by Duncan Renaldo, a B-movie actor who played in kiddie cowboy adventures as "the Cisco Kid." Renaldo was accompanied by Leo Carrillo, who portrayed the comic sidekick Pancho on screen. "After we'd chatted to the Cisco Kid for a while," Underwood recalls, Carrillo "leaned in and whispered to us, and, in a strong Mexican accent, said, 'He is the real Cisco Kid.' We all thought he was a fictional character, but it stuck with us." After a conventional pop-music apprenticeship, trying out rock, blues and folkrock in bands with interchangeable names like the King Bees, the Night Timers and the Lower Third, David Jones took up the surname Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees. He escaped association with a made-for-TV act tainted by its fakeness, and proceeded to implode the whole paradigm of authenticity in rock by glorying in a radically plastic, sexually indefinite persona that was essentially a kind of anti-persona - less an image than a capacity to accommodate any identity at will. A genuinely transformative figure, Bowie changed the way people thought about rock stardom by abandoning everything but change itself. "He didn't like being comfortable," Carlos Alomar points out. "Comfortable is genre-driven, and be careful, because it will outlive you and it will surpass you. David had a lovely saying, 'Let go, or be dragged.' ... It was change, change, change. Bryan Ferry would introduce something and stay there. David would introduce something and leave it." Angus MacKinnon attributes Bowie's restlessness as an artist to basic insecurity. There's no knowing the truth in such conjecture, of course. But this is oral history in which amateur pathology runs as freely as insight, tale-telling and gossip. "His selfanalysis was lacerating," MacKinnon asserts. "He talked a lot about his sense of self, and one of the things that came across, and this was not false modesty, was his constant anxiety that what he was doing wasn't quite interesting enough. Here was a person who seriously pushed himself, and constantly re-evaluated his contribution, and he found himself lacking. Blessing and curse." Gossip is surely plentiful in "David Bowie: A Life." Wendy Leigh, a Bowie biographer quoted here, says Bowie's early manager Ken Pitt was "madly in love" with his client, "and David used that." Simon Napier-Bell, an artists' manager in the '60s, was introduced to Bowie while he was still unknown and told by another manager, Ralph Horton, that if he agreed to co-manage Bowie, he "could have sex with him." The book has lots of sex - lots and lots and lots of sex - though there's no reason to believe the subject is overrepresented. Cyrinda Foxe, a groupie, recalls being summoned into Bowie's bedroom while he was having sex with another woman, because "he needed someone to talk to." At other times, Foxe would be in bed with Bowie herself while, in the next room, Bowie's wife, Angie, would be in bed with someone else. Like that. A welcome surprise of "David Bowie: A Life" is its strength on the essential subject of music making. There are multiple accounts of the speed and professionalism of Bowie's work in the recording studio, and an illuminating explanation of his cut-andpaste method of writing lyrics - a system for sustaining the elusiveness at the heart of Bowie's songs that has something in common with the way this fragmentary, disjointed oral history is constructed. As biography, this "Life" is an imperfect one. It's erratic, at once bloated and too thin, and sometimes hard to parse, with passing references to names and events that could use a bit of explanation. That is to say, it suits its subject perfectly. Bowie imploded the whole idea of authenticity in rock by glorying in a radically plastic persona. DAVID HAJDU is the author, most recently, of "Love for Sale: Pop Music in America."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* One can never have enough books on David Bowie, and Jones' (Mr. Mojo: A Biography of Jim Morrison, 2015) hefty volume is unique in its use of oral history. Based on 180 interviews with friends, family members (including ex-wife Angie), musicians, writers, and producers as well as comments by Bowie himself, this conversational biography traces Bowie's life from the suburbs of London to his phenomenal success during his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s to his peripatetic life in cities around the globe and his later, more stable years in New York, where he lived in a former chocolate factory. Jones also offers his own thoughtful and insightful commentary throughout, along with fascinating observations from the interviewees. David kept up with everything, and he was especially intrigued by punk, said director Julien Temple, while Jack Hofsiss, who directed Bowie in The Elephant Man on Broadway, declares, David did not need to be directed. Bowie's widow, Iman, notes: I fell in love with David Jones his real name, I did not fall in love with David Bowie. The closing pages with Bowie working on both his off-Broadway musical, Lazarus, and his last recording, Blackstar, even as he knows he is dying from liver cancer are especially poignant. A singular addition to the Bowie bookshelf.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this comprehensive oral history, GQ editor Jones delves deeply into the details of rock icon David Bowie's fame, financial problems, drug use, sexuality, Buddhist practices, and romantic entanglements. But it's Jones's focus on Bowie's friendships that truly shines. He has compiled extensive selections from over 180 articles, books, and original interviews (including several interviews Jones conducted with Bowie before his death in 2016). Jones doesn't dwell on his personal feelings toward Bowie, except in his introduction, where he writes: "Like everyone who grew up with the man, Bowie would confound, annoy, and occasionally disappoint me, but I never found him less than fascinating." All these facets of Bowie's personality and more are on display in anecdotes from music journalists, Bowie's bandmates and childhood neighbors, and fellow musicians such as John Lennon and Iggy Pop. Jones incorporates honest, even biting, observations ("David grew up petted and privileged," biographer Wendy Leigh notes. "He wasn't a working-class hero by any stretch")-and such inclusions contribute to the well-roundedness of this remarkable volume. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Described as "a groundbreaking oral history," this ambitious endeavor aims to broaden the David Bowie (1947-2016) legacy, and on that front, British GQ editor Jones does not disappoint. Over 180 contributors offer anecdotes of speculation, frustration, and adoration of the notoriously enigmatic music legend. Insights from known Bowie collaborators, including Peter Frampton, Angie Bowie, Earl Slick, and Iggy Pop blend with lesser-tapped sources such as makeup artists, publicists, and childhood sweethearts in an attempt to craft the mosaic of a multifaceted artist. However, the sprawling style and sheer volume of voices makes for an unwieldy, repetitive chronology. More discomfiting is the cavalier attitude with which memories of sexual trysts with underage fans are discussed by multiple participants. Frequent contradictions, some within a single story, support the overall tone of the book; Bowie was many things to many people but left a universal impression as a consummate creative with a preternatural ability to both embody and surpass the cultural zeitgeist. VERDICT Far from an "introductory course," this tome is best reserved for 301-level Starman fans. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]-Ashleigh Williams, School Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sweeping, gossipy biography of the chameleonic pop star in the form of an oral history, with input from dozens of collaborators, lovers, and admirers.Bowie himself weighs in, too, as longtime music journalist and British GQ editor Jones (Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died, 2014, etc.) scored excellent access to Bowie and his cohort. However, Bowie's contributions are mostly gnomic pronouncementse.g., "my art has little to do with trends, and nothing at all to do with style." For details (and dirt), Jones finds producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, who weigh in on Bowie's approach to recording (game for anything but impatient); fashion and music journalists, who were wowed by his path-breaking 1970s performances; his first wife, Angie, who had an embattled relationship with the singer as he deeply indulged in sex and cocaine in the mid-'70s. (Deep Purple's Glenn Hughes recalls "so many girls coming and going one by one, nonstop.") Bowie's musical output after the early 1980s is generally dismissed as cravenly commercial and/or lazy, but Jones' interlocutors tend to argue even Bowie's miscues reflect the same seeking spirit that produced "Ziggy Stardust"; he just became more interested in acting and art collecting and had settled down with his second wife, Iman. Jones unearths quirky bits of Bowie-ana (he wanted to sing a duet with Mick Jagger from a space shuttle) and details his highly creative months preceding his death from cancer in 2016. But the occupational hazard of oral histories is that they lack broader context, and a hermetically sealed, accentuate-the-positive feel intensifies in closing pages thick with encomiumsthough the author does make room for critic Paul Gorman's assessment: "he made execrable records during 1984-1995, often wore terrible clothes, stupid makeup and had rotten haircuts." Jones captures his subject's transformations and the responses they provoked, but the tone is fan-friendly, assuming Bowie's greatness rather than arguing for it. A dishy but overstuffed and overly praiseful portrait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.